Parliament’s ruling on burka ‘is hurtful’

SABAH Suleiman says her parents opposed her decision to don a niqab as a 16-year-old living in a refugee camp in Sudan in 1991.

Sabah Suleiman defied her parents’ wishes when she was 16, choosing to wear the niqab. Picture: Aaron Francis

SABAH Suleiman says her parents opposed her decision to don a niqab as a 16-year-old living in a refugee camp in Sudan in 1991.

“They didn’t want it,” Ms Suleiman said yesterday. “I’m from a Muslim family but I went to a Catholic school (in Sudan). I fell in love with (the niqab) and I can’t imagine myself without it now. This is my choice.”

She believes women who choose to cover their faces should be accepted rather than made to feel different by being forced to sit in a separate, glass-enclosed public gallery in federal parliament.

Ms Suleiman, a 39-year-old mother of five from Keilor East in Melbourne’s north, allows her two daughters to wear trousers and wants them to be free to choose how to dress.

While her older daughter began wearing the hijab when she started secondary school along with several close friends, her younger daughter, 8, is yet to wear any covering and Ms Suleiman said she did not mind if she never did. “I will not accept them being told what to wear,” she said. “If they want to wear the burka, they will have to fight for it like I did.”

Ms Suleiman was born in Ethiopia of Eritrean parents and grew up in Sudan before coming to Australia in 1996. She said she had often felt judged for covering herself even within her own community, where she says she is the only woman she knows who wears any more than the hijab. But she said she was more distressed by yesterday’s plan to force Muslim women who cover their faces to sit behind glass in federal parliament. “It hurts to hear about it, it hurts a lot,” she said. “People can go almost naked in this country, but when they cover, it’s confronting. I have no words.

“I love Australia. I feel Australia is educated. I feel confident walking down the street and have never been attacked for wearing this, but when people from the government talk, it has an effect.”